Barbara Merz

Posts by Barbara Merz

Staff Council is sponsoring a food drive for the local food shelves. It’s a great time to donate – winter is a time of need and the holiday donation season is over! Non-perishable food will be collected until February 28th. There’s a beautifully labelled collection box in the DFL staff room. (Can you guess who created the signage?). Please be generous.

Arabella, Margey, Joseph W. & Barbara are managing this effort for LIS – please contact us if you have any questions about the drive.

Innovative will update our library system to Millennium Release 2011 1.3. on Monday 12/17/2012 after 6pm. All college library branches and Ilsley Public Library are closed at that time. This maintenance release fixes some known issues but doesn’t add functionality.

There is no server down-time for this software update so access to MIDCAT will not be interrupted. For library staff who might be planning to work, Innovate states “Library staff may continue to work during the installation; however, staff must not post in acquisitions during the time that the update is being installed. Additionally, postpone creating large lists in the Create Lists function or performing large record loads while the update is being installed.”

Users of Millennium clients (Circ, Cat, Acq etc.) will automatically download new client software the first time they log in after the update.

WorldAPP will be upgrading the Key Survey and Extreme Form platforms to version 8.2 on Saturday, November 24th, 2012,
between the hours of 1:00 AM and 10:00 AM EST / 6:00 AM and 3:00 PM GMT.

This update is intended to improve the performance of the applications and provide you with more powerful functionality.

During the system upgrade any individuals and respondents attempting to access surveys/forms or accounts will receive a friendly notice of the system maintenance in progress. Once the maintenance has been completed all links will be accessible again.

To learn more about new features and functionality to Key Survey and Extreme Form, visit our Autumn ’12 Release mini-site.

Following a discussion by the eNewsletter production crew, here’s an update about the purpose & features of the LIS blog. The “About this blog” link sums up the purpose pretty well! All LIS staff members can post and anyone can comment. What might not be so easy to see is the various ways in which LIS blog posts are being repurposed.

“eNewsletter” – theoretically identifies posts to be included in the LIS eNewsletter but rarely used.

The eNewsletter, a compilation of posts from the LIS blog, is created approximately monthly during the regular school year. It goes out to faculty, staff & students as an e-mail blast & statistics show that it drives traffic to the blog. Inclusion in MiddPoints also increases the number of hits on a post for a day or two. The production crew currently favors including posts that are of community interest but haven’t been pushed out to MiddPoints. We’d love to hear what you think about that – how many ways & how many times should our services be advertised? (our pearls cast…).

If you’re not an LIS staff member but have read all the way down to here, please comment – what would you like to see in the blog? how would you like to learn about LIS?